The room is roasting. The salmon order never arrived. That smell means something in the pan is burning. Before the night is through you will have sweated, altered the menu, and instructed employees. You may not have a show on the Food Network or a cookbook at Barnes & Noble, but according to The Gallup Organization, you have the talents that separate a great chef from a good one.
The best chefs are, at their core, generals. The kitchen is a battlefield: It is about command, following orders to the letter, while simultaneously showing flexibility. The chef commands even while teaching; he is creative even while engaging in repetitive motions.
The great chef choreographs this martial ballet with intrinsic skill. You can teach anyone how to make a soufflé, but getting that soufflé right every night, on time, and selling enough of them requires talent -- which raises the issue of how you hire people with that talent. Although some traits of great chefs are job-specific, many of Gallup's findings provide insight into hiring creative people for any type of workplace.
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For all businesses, a bad hire is bad for the bottom line. Yet bringing great employees into the corporate fold tends to be more about luck than good hiring skills. This was certainly true for a multinational corporation with restaurants of various sizes that sought a systematic way of hiring the best chefs for its restaurants. Enter Gallup and the selection profile: a way to find the talents inherent to all great employees. Jan Miller, senior managing consultant and selection practice leader at The Gallup Organization, says companies typically know which employees are their great ones but want to learn how to hire more of them. In creating a selection profile, Gallup builds a model of the strengths and talents of a company's best performers.
While many organizations engage in pre-employment testing, Gallup researchers study a firm's best performers and determine what separates the great employee from the average one. The characteristics of that separation become a Gallup selection profile.
To determine the attributes of a great chef, Gallup conducted focus groups made up of the client's best employees. Gallup asked these outstanding chefs to talk about their work and backgrounds. Then, from their responses, Gallup compiled a list of traits and themes that were common among this group, and developed questions to ask a larger group of chefs. This larger group consisted of chefs at various levels of performance. Rather than asking the questions in a focus group, Gallup asked each chef individually to answer a series of questions in a person-to-person interview.
To boil this information into a profile, Gallup researchers used answers given most frequently by the best chefs to denote what common threads are found among this group. Ultimately, Gallup ended up with its Chef Theme Definitions, a list of attributes an employer should look for when hiring chefs.
Great chefs, for example, have a deep and enduring passion for food. Anthony Bourdain delectably described eating his first oyster in his best-selling book, Kitchen Confidential, like this: "Now, this was a truly significant event. I remember it like I remember losing my virginity -- and in many ways, more fondly."
When asked to name the three most important skills in the kitchen, Christopher Schlesinger, chef-owner of East Coast Grill in Cambridge, Mass. and author of four cookbooks, including License to Grill, rattles off three Gallup findings: teamwork, communication and sense of urgency.
Gallup also found out that truly great chefs don't simply order their kitchen staff around -- they also teach their art to others. Great chefs are adept at juggling so many varied tasks in a shift that failing to teach the other cooks how to maintain quality will ultimately hurt a restaurant's bottom line, says Nancy Jessup, executive chef at Mangia, a corporate caterer and specialty foods store in New York City.
But what truly distinguishes a great chef from a good one -- and great creative individuals from merely good ones -- has nothing to do with food and everything to do with numbers: Great chefs understand that the restaurant business is about money, Gallup determined.
Indeed, the great-chef selection profile shows that for any creative position an organization needs to fill, talent must be combined with good business sense. Adds Gallup profiler Miller: "What stood out for me was the business nature. Great chefs have the ability to make money with their food."
